Last Wednesday the newly ‘selected’ seven members of the standing committee of China’s Communist Party’s politbureau were revealed to a focused world. However, no apparent heir to the general secretary Xi Jinping was in sight. On Tuesday, the final day of the week long Communist Party of China’s 19th congress held every five years, Xi Jinping has been elevated as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. His theory of “Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was added to the party’s principles. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the world’s largest political party with a membership of almost 90 million that has ruled China since the October 1949 revolution. But it’s not the party that was under Mao.
When Xi came to power in 2012, corruption was rampant. The ‘communist’ leaders had amassed obscene wealth. Still the richest 209 communist party parliamentary delegates are each worth more than two billion yuan ($300 million) — their combined wealth is equivalent to the annual GDPs of Belgium and Sweden. Xi began a severe crackdown on corruption after becoming president in 2013. Hundreds of party officials have been arrested. But his favourites in the party’s leadership continued this orgy of plunder. The fortunes of the richest 100 members of party’s top hierarchy — all dollar billionaires — grew by 64 percent in the five years since Xi Jinping took power.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Communist Party hierarchy abandoned central planning re-embraced market with clichés, ‘pragmatism’, ‘seeking truth from facts’ and ‘getting rich to become glorious’ extolled by the then pro-capitalist party boss Deng Xiao Peng. It is true that crisis of bureaucratic mismanagement and ‘nationalist socialism’ had intensified under Mao. But Deng who coined the reactionary term, ‘market socialism’ started capitalist restoration to resolve it. Thereafter private enterprise assumed a bigger role in economy.
The private sector now contributes more than 60.7 per cent of China’s GDP growth and provides over 80 per cent of jobs. This is despite the fact that the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are larger in size. China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. Despite dominant state control, China has all basic capitalist institutions such as the stock exchange and chambers of commerce are functioning.
When Xi came to power in 2012, corruption was rampant. The ‘communist’ leaders had amassed obscene wealth. Still the richest 209 communist party parliamentary delegates are each worth more than two billion yuan ($300 million) — their combined wealth is equivalent to the annual GDPs of Belgium and Sweden
Imran Khan and the likes eulogise the ‘Chinese model’ that supposedly lifted 700 million out of poverty. This World Bank statistic seems engineered. It claimed that 11.2 per cent (almost 150 million people) lived on less than $1.90 a day i.e. below poverty line. Perhaps the WB overlooked 27.2 per cent (almost 360 million people) living on less than $3.10 and more than 950 million below 5 dollars per day. With life in China’s cities so costly, this is hardly any obliteration of poverty.
The main criticism of China by western imperialists is not of China being less capitalist, but they want more ‘democratic space’ for the corporate capital to operate unhindered and loosened state’s capital control. Currency’s value manipulation annoys the western corporate bosses.
The Chinese economy is far more sophisticated and developed than what Deng inherited in the late 1970s. Then the aim was to boost profits from exports and investment — ‘primitive accumulation’. A different set of problems now haunts China’s rulers. The first is to rebalance the economy, shifting from investment to consumption from manufacturing. This transformation is not fast enough to prevent over-investment and accumulation of over-productive capacity. Overall growth has slowed to around 6 to 7 per cent. Concerns of China heading towards a Japanese style prolonged stagnation or a crash have arisen. China is the most indebted country in the world where the public sector debt reached more than 255 percent of the GDP in 2016. This debt was incurred to finance the artificial boom in investments to finance gigantic domestic and international ventures such as the 900 billion dollar Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road, better known as the One Belt and One Road Initiative and CPEC in Pakistan etc.
The problems that Xi faces even with his now absolute power are that wherever capitalism penetrates society it brings along corruption, prostitution, gambling, speculation and crime, its intrinsic organs. Even with the mass purges in the communist party by Xi the root causes of these evils remain intact. Paradoxically the massive investments of western imperialists and the Chinese conglomerates in the last decades have created world’s largest proletariat in China. These workers have started to stretch their muscles with colossal strike movements in the last few years.
China arose as a world power not during the ascent of the system but in the decline of world capitalism. This has exacerbated the contradictions. China is the second largest economy but also has second highest inequality. Revolts by Chinese masses are inevitable. The Xi regime will use nationalism, chauvinism and other means to distract the upsurge. The Chinese communist party that is neither communist nor a party, but its capitalist caricature dominated by corporate billionaires, will come down with brutal repression. But the largest working class aroused in a class struggle will be an invincible force. New class conflicts will explode. A socialist victory of the Chinese proletariat in this class war shall overthrow this parasitic Chinese elite desecrating ‘communism’. It shall galvanise and spread a gigantic tide of genuine revolutionary socialism across continents.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, October 30th 2017.